1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an optical waveguide fiber for dispersion compensation, and particularly to such a waveguide fiber that compensates dispersion and dispersion slope in a high performance optical fiber system.
2. Technical Background
Large effective area optical waveguide fibers have played a key role in enabling long distance, high data rate, wavelength division multiplexed systems. Data rates in the range of 40 GB/s over each of about forty channels have already been reached in commercial systems and even higher rates and channel counts are in the planning stage. Dispersion compensation is a protocol that was adopted early in the design of single channel high performance systems. To augment the beneficial effects of dispersion compensation for multi-channel wavelength division multiplexed systems, effectively extending the dispersion compensation over an extended operating wavelength band, the concept of dispersion slope compensation was introduced.
At present, the combination of improved transmitters and receivers, large effective area waveguide fibers, and dispersion and dispersion slope compensating fibers has increased fiber span length between electronic regeneration modules in high performance systems into the range of hundreds of kilometers.
Improvement in the properties of the compensating optical waveguide fibers can further increase span length between regenerators to decrease cost and at the same time enable even higher data rates. By means of such improvement, existing systems can be upgraded in terms of data rate, the data network can be expanded to reach a wider customer base, and the next generation of telecommunications systems can become a reality.
There is therefore a need for a dispersion and dispersion slope compensating optical waveguide fiber that has sufficiently high negative dispersion to decrease compensating waveguide fiber length, relatively low attenuation, and a ratio of total dispersion to total dispersion slope essentially equal to that of the new large effective area waveguide fibers.